POLICIES & PRINCIPALS: Show of Purpose

The Saigon "incident" lit
up an obscure and most important corner of the free world's struggle
against Communism. In this corner lurked a dangerous fact: the
Communists in many parts of the world had the ability to disrupt by
violence U.S. efforts to help non-Communist governments and peoples. So
far, the U.S. had been able to avoid (or evade) answering force with
force. In the Berlin blockade it had flown over Communist force, in the
Greek war it had armed and trained Greeks to meet it, and in China it
had simply backed away from it.